Greg Cohen has been running the World Yo-Yo Contest for a dozen years. He’s seen it grow in popularity, with hundreds of people from all over the globe, mostly teenage boys, coming to the recent annual competition in Orlando.

Forget Rocking the Baby or Walking the Dog. These throwers do tricks now where the yo-yo isn’t attached to the string. They do tricks where the yo-yo isn’t even attached to the finger. They do tricks with more than one yo-yo at a time.

Four years ago, one competitor from Singapore had to be carted away by ambulance after he dislocated a knee during a preliminary round.

The first world championship was held in 1932, but interest waned. The modern era began in 1992 and has been fueled by yo-yos with transaxle ball-bearings that seemingly spin forever and cost up to $400.

Top throwers post their tricks on YouTube. “They’re skill junkies,” Cohen said. “It’s the adrenaline rush you get from controlling your body, the same thing any other athlete finds joy in.”

The culture is such that simply repeating someone else’s moves is considered uncool. Although there’s a small amount of prize money involved, it’s mostly about expanding the envelope of the toy, to do tricks nobody else has done.

“Why do people compete?” Cohen asked. “Because there is no upper limit to this. You can never beat the yo-yo. All you can do is raise the bar of what’s possible.”

When Abram Burrows first started playing Pokémon, he had no idea what was possible — to play in tournaments that might one day take him and his family to Hawaii.

He got interested in the game, a Japanese invention that involves collecting, training and fighting with various creatures, through his older brother. He started playing competitively about three years ago.

This year, he won a tournament in Long Beach that put him in the nationals in Indianapolis. He won that, too, and qualified for the worlds in Waikoloa, on the Big Island, where players are vying for $100,000 in scholarships.

Pokémon is paying his way (and covering his father’s expenses, too). The rest of the family is coming along, turning Abram’s success into a vacation.

He said he doesn’t feel like the tournaments are so intense they sap the fun he gets out of the game — yet. He does expect it will get harder the older he gets; next year, when he’s 12, he’ll have to compete in a different bracket with players up to age 15.

So he and his brother are training their younger sister to play in the 11 and under bracket. “We’re hoping she can win and get us the free trips,” Abram said.

No end in sight

The sociology of sport is a growing academic discipline, fueled in part by the proliferation of contests in this country. Roberts, the San Diego State professor, teaches a class on the sociology of surfing. He’s written about sports and race, and athletic mascots.

He said the working class has fueled an explosion in sports (and competition of all kinds) in the past two decades. “Sports is an escape from the boredom of everyday life, or from the boredom of their jobs,” he said. “These people long for excitement.”